Staying on Top When Your World's Upside Down

Have the courage to pursue your highest goal

“You connect with your highest goal when you awaken full of enthusiasm for the day and when you know you are making a contribution. It is synonymous with being in the flow, periods in which you are so totally absorbed with what you are doing that time stops and fulfillment comes naturally. It is making your life itself a work of art.” Michael Ray: The Highest Goal: The Secret that Sustains You in Every Moment

The single most important class I’ve ever taken I wasn’t even registered for – I was a stowaway. When I was at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1984, by far the most popular course was Michael Ray’s class on Creativity in Business (he was also author of the bestselling book of the same title). I didn’t even make the waiting list. So I showed up anyway and sat on the floor at the back of the room. While it was not policy to allow students to audit classes that had been fully subscribed, this being a course on creativity we came to an agreement on how I could participate, since I’d shown up (remember – Woody Allen says 90 percent of success is simply showing up).

Twenty years later I was Michael’s guest speaker for his last class before he retired. In the interim I’d founded (created) a nonprofit organization to fight the tobacco industry and the company that is now Values Coach Inc. I know I never would have done either had it not been for what I learned – both about the world and about myself – by auditing Michael’s class.

The night before that class Michael and I went out for dinner. I told him that in the years since school I’d come to realize that his wasn’t really a class about creativity, it was a class about courage. He gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “Don’t tell anyone – they never would have let me teach a course about courage.”

It’s too bad, really, that we don’t teach courses on courage and perseverance in school. Nothing is more important – especially when your world is upside down.